Directed by Jeff Tremaine

Starring: Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Steve-O and Chris Pontius

95 minutes

Several years after sound robbed him of his career, Buster Keaton visited his doctor in excruciating pain. After consulting his X-rays, the doctor asked Keaton when he broke his neck. “Never,” was Buster’s reply. It seems that midway through filming the astonishing Sherlock, Jr., a powerful spray from a water tower nozzle he was hanging from propelled the daredevil 20 feet to the train tracks below. He called an end to the day’s shooting, but was back on set the next morning oblivious to his injury.

Why am I mentioning the cinema’s single greatest source of comedic invention in the same space as these 21st century homoerotic Stooges? Not since the Great Stone Face (and later Jackie Chan) have performers literally broken their bones to fracture an audience. Johnny Knoxville even goes so far as to recreate the famous collapsing house gag from Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr.

Of course, the similarities stop here. The only thing the Jackass boys have in common with Keaton and Chan’s meticulously executed frames is that they all eventually run through a projector. Keaton slaved over timing and execution, using surveyor’s equipment to map out some of his more elaborate gags. All Steve-O has to do for a laugh is staple his nutsack to his inner thigh.

People were stunned by the success of Jackass: The Movie. Pop culture is currently stuck in reality-TV mode, and it doesn’t get more real than this. I was the first kid on the block to discover the MTV series (stuff like this finds me). I even went so far as researching one of the show’s rude progenitors. Jackass is a kinder, gentler form of Bam Margera’s supremely mean-spirited CKY (Camp Kill Yourself) videos. Four DVD volumes exist. Get to work!

How fitting that John Waters has a cameo, for not since Divine smiled at the camera with dog shit covering her teeth has my gag reflex kicked in during a movie. Even with a black bar slapped over it, probably to prevent an NC-17 rating, the sight of a man sipping from a cup of fresh hot horse jism literally found me retching with laughter.

The last thing I want to do is give away too many of the hilarious gross-out gags. If you liked the first installment, this is one sequel that does not disappoint.

Rating:

Directed by Kirby Dick

Written by Kirby Dick, Eddie Schmidt and Matt Patterson

Featuring: John Waters, Kimberly Peirce, David Ansen and America’s Tastemaster General Jack Valenti

97 minutes

Did you hear the one about how the Motion Pictures of America Association (MPAA), a lobbying organization for the movie industry, rates movies? If you show tits, they give it an NC-17. If you take a chainsaw and lop them off, it gets an R and parents can bring their kids.

They must be right, for if anyone was to blame for giving me access to “dirty” movies it’s a set of parents who never once censored or questioned their kid’s movie-going habits. They probably thought Midnight Cowboy was a sequel to Stagecoach and didn’t flinch when it came to taking a 14- year-old to a drive-in screening of the then X-rated drama. Seconds after Bob Balaban orally relieved Jon Voight in a movie theater, my dad leaned across the front seat and whispered to my mom, “I don’t think this was a good movie to take the kid to.”

Upon turning 18, the MPAA could kiss my ass. Satan knew better than to allow me to spawn and a lack of parental responsibility and a penchant for profanity always drew me to R-rated features. It wasn’t until years later, armed with the knowledge that most newspapers refuse to run ads for NC-17 films, that I began to reconsider the perils of rating movies. Should a handful of “average” Republican parents and an appeals board complete with two priests, one Catholic and the other Episcopalian, be allowed to rule on cinematic morality?

Not much has changed since the late ’20s when Will Hays (a Kiwanian, Rotarian and Presbyterian elder) was called upon to rid Hollywood’s screens of morally pernicious material. People who refuse to watch old black-and-white movies because they’re “corny” frequently have the puritanical ratings board to blame. The “Hays Office,” as it collectively came to be referred to, quashed any form of free expression for almost the next 40 years.

While Hays’ equally repressed successor Catholic Layman Joseph Breen is never mentioned, This Film Is Not Yet Rated is careful to rigorously examine the words of his present day incarnation Jack Valenti. Until his retirement a couple of years ago, Valenti spent decades riding herd over the MPAA. For all his well-intentioned public relations razzle-dazzle, Valenti can only come up with one sound argument. A truly great film will find an audience no matter what it’s rated. Unfortunately, it takes an audience of paranormals to unearth a film that has no advertising.

Short of installing an alligator-filled moat, you can’t find a more inaccessible edifice than the MPAA fortress on Ventura Boulevard in Encino. With a horde of prospective P.I.’s to choose from, director Kirby Dick awarded the surveillance job to Becky Altringer, an extremely likeable gay single mom. She and her lover’s daughter, Lindsey, spent hours parked outside the MPAA’s garage keeping track of members’ license plate numbers. Her defining moment arrives when a security guard leaves his station long enough for her to videotape a list of coveted phone extensions tacked to the booth wall.

The film consults many artists whose work was taken to task by the almighty board. The strongest of the talking heads is Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Peirce, who argues that a film is more likely to get an NC-17 if the sex depicted involves gays. She was equally stunned to discover that the board sanctioned Hilary Swank’s brains splattered on a wall, but found Chloe Sevigny’s extended orgasm over the line.

Needless to say, due to a glut of sexually explicit clips, This Film Is Not Yet Rated is playing unrated. While much of it is intended to illustrate, some scenes, particularly a montage depicting violence against women, seem gratuitous. The filmmakers were so eager to earn the ratings board’s scorn that they take an almost schoolyard delight in pushing the envelope.

Historically speaking, the first movie to challenge the ratings board (and win) was the Italian import The Bicycle Thieves, not The Moon is Blue, as this film contends. There is also a great story behind how violence in the first Indiana Jones sequel coupled with a Gremlin in a microwave forced the board to concoct the PG-13 rating. Instead of presenting a more concise overview, the film settles on a couple of Super Size Me-styled sidebars, childish, sub-“South Park” animation, a score reminiscent of TV’s “Charlie’s Angels” and one too many backseat shots of a giddy Kirby Dick.

Aside from its historical shortcomings, the film is most negligent in not damning several prime culprits. Cowardly newspapers that tow some invisible moral line by refusing to run ads for NC-17 movies are given a pass. Complacent audiences, eager to lap up whatever slop is heaped on their plates, also deserve a share of the blame. The reason that so many contemporary films rake in millions is due in large part to America’s indiscriminate taste for the undemanding.

If the film’s main goal was unmasking all of the MPAA’s players, the detective work paid off. We now know their identities, but their rationale, not unlike their lodgings, remains impenetrable.

Rating: 1/2